Amazon launches the Fire Phone

Amazon has launched its first smartphone -- Fire Phone -- that
seamlessly integrates with the Amazon Prime ecosystem and comes
with a range of new nifty apps.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to the stage at an event in Seattle
to announce the long-rumoured "3D phone" to an audience of
journalists. While the hardware matches up to some of its
competitors -- which Bezos identified as the likes of the Samsung
Galaxy S5 and the iPhone 5S -- some of the most impressive features
were found in its software, particularly in the shape of a
Shazam-for-all-content called Firefly and the display's "dynamic
perspective" (essentially motion parallax),
which gives the device the "3D" effect that people have expected. But more on those
later.

Hardware

The machined aluminium device has a 4.7-inch LCD HD display and
has a quad-core 2.2 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM. Camera-wise,
there's a 13-megapixel shooter on the back with image stabilisation
technology to try and counteract wobbly human hands. The camera can
be launched within a single click, even from the lockscreen. With
such an emphasis on photography, you'll need some storage: Fire
comes with unlimited storage for photos on Amazon Cloud.

For audio, the phone comes with dual stereo speakers with
virtual surround sound provided by Dolby. If you don't want to sodcast
to the world, the phone comes with tangle free earbuds with flat
cables and magnetic earbuds, so you won't find yourself with a
cable bird's nest in your pocket.

Content

The Fire Phone comes with apps for video and music -- both
Amazon's own apps such as Prime Music and third-party apps such as
Pandora, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify.

Of course, with Amazon's Kindle background, there's a strong
emphasis on reading too and it comes with hundreds of magazines and
newspapers, with "immersion reading" that lets you read and listen
to a book simultaneously.

The phone also comes with the Mayday customer support feature
that connects individuals with a person to help answer questions
about things like how to turn off international roaming, set up
Bluetooth etc, without having to trawl through a complicated
forum.

Firefly

A new service called Firefly combines a range of
media-identification capabilities into one app. It uses the phone's
camera to recognise products and then add them to your Amazon
shopping cart. During the demonstration on stage, it seemed
extremely fast -- taking less than half a second. Firefly also has
a Shazam-esque song, movie and TV-show recognition capability. It
uses the microphone to listen into a scene of a show and identify
which episode you are watching -- similar to Facebook's recent app
update. It can also identify works of art and connect you to
Wikipedia information about them, factoring in any changes in
viewing angle, meaning that you don't have to be square-on for it
to work. It can also instantly scan and copy text from posters,
URLs, email addresses and phone numbers so you don't have to type
them in thanks so some clever image analysis. It uses semantic
boosting to improve recognition of, say, phone numbers as it
already has an in-built knowledge of how phone numbers work in
order to improve the probability of character recognition -- no
mean feat.

Firefly seems extremely nifty and as a consequence, Amazon has
given the tool its own button on the side of the phone. This means
you can start recognising the world even from the lockscreen.
Developers can build on top of Firefly thanks to an SDK. This means
that, for example, a calorie counting app like MyFitnessPal can
suddenly have image-recognition capabilities, so instead of typing
in the name of a food product, you can just take a photo of it and
it will automatically add nutritional information to your food
diary.

Dynamic perspective (not 3D)

The 3D element to the phone comes in the shape of something
called "dynamic perspective" which is a hologram-like effect that
comes from transforming flat images into 3D models that can be
viewed from different angles using the screen as a "window" onto a
3D world. It's not really 3D, but something called motion parallax
-- a trick of the eye that comes from changing the image as you
move your head. This means that the phone has to track where your
head is, and it does this with the front-facing cameras (there are
no fewer than four of them) that have infrared
capabilities. On a simple level this allows for cool 3D-effect
images on your lockscreen, but also allows you to take a fly
through a 3D environment such as a map simply by tilting the
phone.

Launch date and price

The phone will be availabe in the US for $199 (32GB) or $299
(64GB) on a two year contract or $650-$749 without a
contract. The first phones will ship on 25 July. As
with most Amazon launches, it will likely become available in
Europe around six months after the US launch. So far we don't have
the price details for the UK launch.